Hertz

So you're using a non-supported video card?

In other words, you want every archetype to play exactly the same.

I can't begin to explain to you why that's broken. That's balance for the sake of balance.

Please try to comprehend this. Some players LIKE playing a so-called "support class." Those players will HOWL like banshees if you suddenly turn all Defenders, Dominators, Corruptors, etc., into Just-Like-A-Scrapper solo machines with no team synergy.

There's no particular reason to create absolute parity in the way every Archetype and every Power Set plays, except that you want the same I'm-Such-A-Killing-Machine rush on every character.

I'll say it again. Not everybody WANTS that.

Your ideas here, frankly, are what lead directly to the likes of D&D 4.0, where everybody is so balanced that you can't tell the classes apart.

What am I saying? Do the math:

You're facing 8 enemies. Each has a 50% chance to hit, and a 25% chance to stun.

That means on any given round, anybody facing those enemies will be hit with a stun. Statistically speaking, a squishie will be stunned more or less constantly; a Tanker or Scrapper, not at all.

When a squishie is stunned, his output = 0, except in the case of Defiance. No buffs, no holds go out, no damage, nothing. It doesn't matter how many bells and whistles a squishie has, or how low you set Tanker and Scrapper damage, if the frequency of stuns is this high. I'm not speaking of magnitude, here, I'm speaking of probability. As the enemy count scales up, the probability magnifies enormously. It's like the odds of rolling a 1 on a six-sided die ... but you're rolling ten of 'em at a time.

To put it another way: if Corruptors do 1000 damage and Brutes do 800, but Corruptors are mezzed 25% of the time, who does more for the team?

I advocate changing the volume of enemies with mezzes. Make the mezzes stronger — this won't affect the squishies one way or another, a stun is a stun — but make them less frequent. This will mean Brutes, Tankers, Scrappers, and Stalkers do occasionally have to worry about mezzes, just like everybody else, but it won't overwhelm the poor squishies who get chain-mezzed by enemies like Malta.

It's not hard to understand.

However, you probably need to come to a basic understanding that even if they made it possible to have non-unique names, you still might not get what you want. If your argument is based upon "give me what I want!" then accept that this method may not necessarily do so.

Patently false.

ALL archetypes face the same problem with scaling, random number generation, large numbers of enemies, and the purple patch. You do more damage, and hit more often, against enemies below your level; you do less damage, and hit less often, against enemies above your level.

EVERY defensive-oriented toon faces those problems. Scrappers, Brutes, Tankers, and Scrappers get hit harder, and hit more often, when facing larger groups of high-level enemies. Controllers' and Dominators' holds hit less often and last less time. Defenders' and Corruptors' debuffs are less effective. ALL attacks hit less often. Damage scales down.

If you want to seriously argue for a rebalance of every archetype, consider the following:

Buffs are additive, rather than multiplicative. This makes Defenders, Corruptors, Masterminds and Controllers each a force multiplier. Watch me do the math, D&D-style.

Suppose, using d20 mechanics for ease of illustration, enemies hit 50% of the time (on a 20-sided die, call it an 11 or better). Your character has 35% (+7) defense, so you are only hit on a roll of 18-20. My character has 40% (+8) defense and is hit only on a 19 or 20. In other words, you are hit 3 times out of 20, I am hit 2 times out of 20. We each have 100 hit points, and enemies do 25 points of damage; we can each survive only 4 direct hits. This means you will survive for 26 rounds, and I will survive for 40.

Our baseline, before we add a Defender into the mix, my defense is 5% more than yours, but I survive 53% longer.

Now we add a Defender. The Defender gives us each +5% (+1). Now you will be hit on a 19 or 20, and I will be hit on a 20.

Your character has 40% (+8) defense and will survive 40 rounds. My character has 45% (+9) defense, and will survive 80 rounds, twice as long as you.

Your defense went up by 5%, and your survival went up by 53%. My defense went up by 5%, and my survival went up by 100%. The benefit we each receive is not proportionate.

Force. Multiplier. The buff scale is exponential, not linear.

If you want to balance the archetypes, step one is to rewrite the entire powers system from the ground up. You might want to ask Sony Online Entertainment how that worked out for them.

I think this idea has some potential, but only in that it is the nugget of a good concept. In many ways it is still broken.

One: the harder the mission, the more you're likely to die. A person who does weak, no-boss at level -1 missions is going to have a better reputation than a solo monster who does +3x8 missions and dies once in a while. This doesn't seem right.

Two: ramping up the effective punishment for defeat changes the behavior of risk-averse players. They'll lower the difficulty, slow down, approach even small groups with hit-and-run tactics, and ... this is the terrible part ... run away when things get bad. Is this the kind of behavior that you want to encourage in a superhero game?

Three: if the entire group is punished every time somebody on the team dies, you'll see teams start to shun and exclude the "weaker" archetypes. They won't invite Blasters or Dominators, knowing they're more likely to die — and Blasters and Dominators take more teamwork to keep 'em alive. You don't want that kind of behavior either.

I think this needs to go back to the drawing board.

I do remember the question as purely hypothetical as well, but along the lines of "what one thing would you change in your wildest fantasies if you had unlimited time and resources?"

I understand where you're coming from here, truly. In theory — on paper — it can be done. The combination can be made to work, if it is designed with care. However, I do not believe your approach is adequate.

It's a fine and elegant plan to state the proliferation as you do: "Self-Defense can pair with Melee Set, Control, and Ranged Sets." It states the objective clearly, and it does so in a simple, clean way that makes it seem simple to implement. However, simple this is not.

The existing self-defense sets, as designed, do not pair well with Ranged or Control. They were never meant to. As an example: Invulnerability gets a power, Invincibility, that grants a slight bonus to DEF and TO-HIT, based on the number of enemies within range. It is therefore ideally leveraged against melee powers. What happens if you change that?

Invulnerability + Control

• You will very likely end up with the enemies locked down — Slept, Immobilized, Stunned, or Held — all over the map. Most will be out of range. Invincibility will be largely ineffective, and one of the key, basic, essential powers in the set will be out of balance. Tanker secondaries have Taunt, with its -Range debuff component, that helps scoop enemies into melee range. Controllers... do not.
• In addition, the strength of Invulnerability is based upon a certain estimated-time-to-failure. Damage Deflected Over Time is carefully calibrated to the Damage Dealt Over Time figure so the Tanker has a fighting chance. The combat is neither too easy (viz, his damage or his defenses, or both, are too high) nor too difficult (either his damage or his defense, or both, are too low). If you throw a Control set into the mix, which generally does a fraction of the damage, such a character would die long before he took out any of the enemies.
• You also would get very strange synergies with certain sets, allowing things to happen that should never be allowed. For instance, Invincibility has a PBAOE Taunt aura. And Fire Control has Fire Imps. You could summon some Fire Imps, go AFK with your taunt aura turned on, and they would destroy everything in perfect safety while you were drinking Jaegermeister and watching the ball game.

Invulnerability + Ranged

• Enemy AI is designed to behave in a certain way, and the sets are balanced around that known and somewhat predictable behavior. Some enemies prefer to stay at range; some prefer to keep to melee. Creating a Self-Defense-Ranged combination will create brand-new exploits in enemy behavior. Just to name one: Super Reflexes gets Ranged Defense. It's the ultimate kiting set: stay at range with your blasts, turn on Ranged Defense, and you never need anything else.
• You also get strange and unintended synergies here too. Dark Armor + Dark Blast gives you a self-healing, mez-proof, stealth sniper with self-rez and a boatload of -To Hit debuffs. Why would you play anything else? And that's just the first thing that leapt to mind — if you unleash a poorly thought out system upon the game world, you can bet your eyeteeth that the other gamers more cunning than I will find ways to use these combinations to pry huge holes in it. Every combination would have to be analyzed or rejected on its own merits. Grand, sweeping statements like "Self-Defense goes with Ranged" look great on paper but the devil is in the details, always.

The time to test new sets would dramatically increase. Right now, a new Self-Defense set has to be tested in synergy with all of the existing melee attack sets. First, the animations must be compatible; second, the powers must be compatible; third, the effects must be compatible. (For instance, you couldn't do Assault Rifle/Shield, and Claws/Trick Arrow would have a despicably slow redraw problem as you had to switch between weapons constantly.) If you allow the kind of proliferation you're speaking of, every set would have to be tested against almost every other set.

It really would be much, much easier to create a single new Archetype with a particular combination — Team Defense + Melee, for instance — and build a small number of intercompatible power sets around that concept.

This is not the way to convince people that you have a reasonable point of view. If you're this wonderful and lovely and understanding when trying to team with people, there's no wonder why they're so eager to be your friend.

Look: there is already an incentive to team, and that is rate of XP. The people who want to maximize their XP gain will team with you, and in fact will rarely bother doing any missions unless they have at least six people on the team. The ones who don't care about maximum XP gain ... won't.

Read that last sentence again. There are people who don't care about maximizing their rate of XP gain. Are these the people that you want on your team?

I tend to team up with 3-4 people all the time, mostly just my friends, because our playstyle is compatible. Dave has little kids in his house; he often has to make us wait while he's putting one to bed, or feeding them dinner, or making them stop hitting each other with rocks. Joe is a nurse and is often "on call" and may have to leave the team without warning. Jon likes to stop and chat with people on IRC. Are these the people you want to team with?

You could force my buddies and me to take you on board. But you'd be miserable at our snail's pace, stop-and-go method of gaming, unmaximized builds, slow progress, frequent time outs, and rarely running at "8-man Invincible" levels. And we'd be miserable having you — that is, if you're one of those "shut up and PLAY!" people who can't stand friendly banter and a slow pace.

Think about who you want to team with, and be with those guys.

Exactly. That is your incentive to, I don't know, conserve endurance. Use blues. Attack less quickly than you can, so you're not chugging your whole endurance bar like an audience at a Dead concert devours those brownies.

If you never had to turn your toggles back on, they would be Auto powers. You'd just turn them on at the start of the game and leave them on until you logged out. No strategy whatsoever. But they're not: they're toggles. You have to decide how to prioritize your energy consumption.

This game isn't that hard. I see no reason to make it even easier.

Tomato, tomahto.

If players deserve to be allowed to play "the way they want to play it," then there would be Instant I Win buttons on every screen.